Provocative, and entirely spot-on, commentary on Facebook by Mark Galli . My time on Facebook is kept very minimal because of it’s lack of true community and interaction.
While the popularity of Facebook facilitates broad connectivity, I believe it does so at the expense of intimacy. Intimacy is what we really want. But because we are lazy and fearful creatures, we’ll settle for connectivity, because connectivity suggests intimacy but without all the bother. It’s like fooling around before marriage: lots of fun but without the danger of pregnancy or the psychological commitment of intercourse.
While Facebook connects me to people at one level (I have more “friends” than I’ve ever had — I feel so popular!), at another level it makes it harder to really connect with people. This is especially true when I take my Facebook responsibilities seriously — that is, read friends’ status updates, regularly post my own, and send messages to friends. It’s a lot of fun when I have the time. But it’s a huge distraction.
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as we are slowly learning in this techie age, electronic communication is a poor substitute for audible conversation and physical presence with another. There’s a reason God created us with bodies, and why bodily presence is necessary to create and sustain truly meaningful human relationships.
Instead, for most of us most of the time, Facebook is relational entertainment. And like all forms of entertainment, it is a gift of the Creator of joy. It can temporarily distract us from our routines and problems, and offer brief spurts of happiness. It seems more human than television, but in the end, it’s an extension of television. It’s interactive reality television. We read about the daily plotlines of other characters, and add our own plot twists and witty dialogue, and then talk to others about what we read and said around the office coffee machine.